Installation notes

To go a little deeper into my ideas concerning this phase of the project, here is the text I have written to accompany the installation:

This installation is a re-imagining of “An Arcade Project”, a place-based dance project developed between August and November 2011. The four-month process culminated in performances at the Westminster Arcade in downtown Providence on the 18^th and 19^th November 2011. However, although the project was oriented towards the development and presentation of the performances, they were only one aspect of a multi-faceted process that also produced a large number of photographs, voice recordings, video footage, and blog posts. This installation explores the nature of the work that was done, re-imagining and re-presenting what “An Arcade Project” was, and is, in its holistic, yet fragmented entirety. 

Mediation was a central theme in “An Arcade Project”. Multiple layers of mediation were involved in the various outcomes of the project, connecting disparate sources and transposing ideas between mediums; bodies mediating memories, memories mediating place, bodies mediating place, archives mediating place, video mediating bodies, photographs mediating bodies mediating place…the list circles back on itself endlessly. In a continuation of this theme, this installation re-mediates various outputs of the project, reassembling them to create new juxtapositions and new relationships between individual components.

Like the performances, the installation is about experience of place. At the performances, both the performers and the audience created the experience by making movement choices that defined their interactions with and perceptions of spaces. The installation also invites audience agency, using the design of the Granoff Center to encourage exploration—explorations of space, of ideas, of histories, and, of course, of the Arcade itself.